tag
On my way home today the bus drove past a big billboard ad for a Funeral Home. Underneath the name for the funeral home was a black and white picture of a child drinking from a bowl of something, and the following statement:
We donate to the Food Bank!
Heaven help me, it crossed my mind to come back late at night with a black spray can and spray underneath, “OK, EW.”
This wasn’t the first time I’ve been seized with the urge to add a necessary bit of scrawl to something that deserved it, though to be honest I’ve only ever acted on said urge once. In one of the upstairs washrooms in my High School, someone had scratched, “JULIE IS A SLUTE”, to which I simply had to add, in pencil, and in the calmest, most lucid lowercase commentation possible, “What, exactly, is a slute?” That one I’m rather proud of, not only in that I did it in pencil so it could be easily cleaned, but because after it WAS cleaned, someone else actually rewrote my comment there, in pen this time. Unless they’ve repainted, which is likely, it’s there still…
I think my favourite graffito I’ve ever seen in person has to be the defiant scrawl I saw on a fencepost one time, “WORSHIP SATIN!” Now I don’t know if the person who wrote this had the least interest in textiles, but I’m sure that somewhere the Dark Lord of Smoothness was well pleased.
Otherwise I don’t agree with graffiti in general. I mean, I got a kick out of the night that some students went round the tunnels of the University I went to and wrote about two thousand comments and quotes in magic marker on the walls…some of which were quotes from great authors and philosophers…including Bokonon. Most of the comments were very apt indeed, and all were written very carefully and lucidly.
But in general, no…it’s not usually terribly intelligent…just territorial marking really, and often ugly. It boggles my mind that people, given the chance to be creative, would want to make the world more ugly. But then there’s a lot that’s been boggling my mind in that area lately…I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that things are rather upside-down at present. Case in point (and yes, I despise the term ‘case in point’), the billboard I mentioned at the top of this post. People aren’t thinking things through lately. There doesn’t seem to be time.
I suppose this is why, given the chance and a suitable writing implement, so many will use that chance to scrawl nothing more than a hasty, “I was here.”, in the form of a hideous scribble. We are here, now. Tomorrow, who knows.
…
Well, they can’t all be funny.
;o)